A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to information transfer, and in particular to apparatus and methods for sending and receiving information to and from multiple types of devices and communications media.
B. Description of the Prior Art
Many types of information transfer occur in the modem commercial environment. For example electronic mail ("E-mail") and facsimile ("fax") are frequently used to transfer information between people. Many forms of computer networks exist to transfer information between computers. Examples include local area networks, wide area networks, local area networks, intranets and the Internet.
Fax transmission ranks only behind telephone voice calls as the most reliable and widely used form of communication throughout the world. Long distance charges for faxing in the U.S. alone is estimated at about $30 billion annually. International charges are proportionally much higher, especially for faxes originating outside the U.S. AT&T estimates that about 56% of its U.S.-Asian long distance traffic is for fax traffic. An estimated 60 billion pages of documents will be transmitted from U.S. fax machines in 1996, and that figure is expected to double before the end of the decade.
It is estimated that the number of fax machines in use ranges from 30 to 80 million machines world wide. A more conservative view is that there are about 41/2 million machines currently operating in the Fortune 500 companies world wide, and probably an equal number in the rest of the corporate world. Even more astounding is the rate of growth in numbers of fax machines in major companies: about 25% per year for the past several years.
There are several advantages of using fax machines. People trust faxing because the process can be seen, heard, and verified, and because fax machines are intuitive to operate. In fact, corporations spend literally nothing for fax training. Everyone can use fax machines, they are located everywhere, and they are dependable for delivering information from one place to another.
Although the basic technology of faxing has remained the same for quite some time, the nature of fax transmission usage has changed dramatically. Faxes were often used in the past for merely conveying small notes and quickly delivered letters. Today, however, faxes are also used for higher volume purposes, such as delivery of commercial documents for ordering and delivering goods and services. Now, instead of sending a simple page of changes to a document, the entire document is retransmitted for only an incremental cost.
The fax machine, however, is frequently taken for granted, or even ignored, in corporate communications and computer networks. While computer-generated faxes have been used to advantage in specific applications and circumstances, communications via facsimile has not been as popular in the world of local area and wide area networks and information integration.
Similarly, E-mail is frequently used, but only in very specific circumstances. People are habit-prone to using one or the other for communicating with another person, and the recipient really has no choice in how information is received. This results in a need for people to monitor a variety of communication media each having different types of information forms of protocol and data. Moreover, the types of protocol and data may be multiplied if many communications media are used. Therefore, the use of each form of communication is constrained in many ways.
There are many forms of computer networks in use in commercial, academia, and government environments. For example, the Internet is now widely used virtually everywhere.
Internet connections are valuable for a number of reasons. First, use of the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) on the "World Wide Web," such as by Web servers and Web browsers, has revolutionized many areas of business. The Internet has brought a critical mass of information content, including communications, into the corporate environment. Products such as Java, ActiveX controls, and client/server applications are revolutionizing how business is conducted with customers and vendors.
Second, the Internet makes it possible to connect throughout the world for the cost of a local connection. "Everyone" is paying for their small connection piece, and the result is a vast network that no one individual could afford. Changes to operating systems now make accessing Internet resources as simple and easy as accessing a local device.
Additional features of computer networks provide enhanced functionality. For example, "Groupware" computing allows multiple users to share information in a cooperative fashion. Remote access computing allows users to dial in by standard telephone lines while away from the office and operate as though they were connected to the computer network in the office.
Despite the complementing advantages of faxing and computer communication, systems implementing these forms of communications have not been successfully melded into a single seamless system. There are several reasons for this. First, fax machines are not typically connected to corporate computer networks at all. Second, known methods of such connections have significant disadvantages. One method, for example, used a "fax/modem." However, fax machines and fax/modems connected to personal computers require a telephone line to communicate to the outside world. Telephone lines may or may not be part of a corporate computer communication system. Moreover, integration of faxing into the corporate information structure is practically non-existent.
For individual users, a fax/modem is useful in sending faxes of computer-generated documents. However, it is to difficult, time consuming, and expensive to convert paper documents to electronic form using scanners and disk storage. It is far easier to print the electronic document, combine them with the paper ones, and drop them into the nearest fax machine. Moreover, computer screens are an inferior way to display document pages, thus important documents received by a computer via fax/modem are typically printed and treated as paper documents.
Another method for integrating computer networks and fax communications uses a fax server, that is, a computer-equipped fax with multiple fax ports to send and receive faxes, and specialized software for routing an incoming fax and delivering it to the appropriate client connected fax machine. There are a number of applications where fax servers handle large volumes of fax traffic, thus justifying the high initial costs by spreading costs over a large number of users.
Fax servers also have a number of drawbacks, however. They are not cost effective for applications serving less than a high number of users, making them inappropriate for branch office locations or in specialized department locations. Moreover, fax servers are merely powerful versions of computers with fax/modems, so many of the drawbacks of PCs with fax/modems apply to fax servers as well.
Yet another attempt to enhance functionality of fax communication is exemplified in a server now offered in which a fax machine user dials a toll-free access number, enters a user code, and then starts the fax transmission over a proprietary communications network. Fax delivery is usually guaranteed within a defined time, and optional confirmation reports can be received after the fax has arrived, and telephone cost reduction can be achieved..
Many companies, however, do not wish to send faxes over networks they cannot reasonably control. Concerns about reliable delivery and security of information in faxes is an often repeated reason why corporations have not chosen these services in any noticeable measures. These services do not offer any added value by integrating faxes into corporate information systems.
The primary problem with each of multiple types of information and currently available computer networks is that both senders and receivers of information have very few choices in the form of communication of information. That is, senders of E-mail must send messages to an E-mail box. Receivers of E-mail must retrieve the E-mail from the E-mail box. Senders of faxes must send to a computer or a fax machine. Receivers of faxes must convert the fax in the computer or print the fax out on the fax machine. It is therefore desirable to provide methods and apparatus to facilitate integration of a fax machine into corporate communications networks while minimizing the problems of the prior art.